– in which Dorn explores flatware iconography in the time of pandemic.
iving in pandemic-induced isolation for two months now has had some strange effects on us. A few days ago we decided that we needed some grapefruit spoons. Never mind that in the past we rarely ate grapefruit (the last time I remember craving them was when the doc had given me a course of pills with the instruction that I couldn’t eat grapefruit while I was on them, and suddenly I yearned for them). We got a couple of ruby-red grapefruit in one of our curbside-pickup orders and they were delicious, and now we’ve vowed to live on nothing but grapefruit, and to eat it as it should be eaten, with a grapefruit spoon, small side up, in a dedicated grapefruit tureen.
The stores might only just now be re-opening, but Amazon and others have been there for us stir-crazy consumers all along, so lickety-split, before I had a chance to rationally weigh the pros and cons of the decision, I ordered us a matched pair. They’re arriving tomorrow.
I wonder if the relationship between being quarantined and pining for specialized spoons has ever been studied scientifically? It has certainly been lauded in song and story often enough (and by “often enough”, I mean at least once, which I think you’ll agree might be enough).
We saw a simulcast last year of the Metropolitan Opera production of The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. It was one of those modern operas sung in atonalities, about guests who are trapped by their own tortured psyches at a dinner party, and can’t leave it. Like us, perhaps, they felt a foreboding of doom so strong that they couldn’t just open the front door and walk out.
Alert: spoilers about the opera follow.
Disclaimer: these spoilers won’t answer any questions about the plot or outcome of the opera. In fact, they won’t really help you understand the opera at all. I saw it, and even watching the whole thing didn’t really help me understand it (though I did really enjoy it).
In one of the opera’s most famous scenes, the counter-tenor sings a frantic ode to coffee spoons, and bemoans his tragic fate at being forced to drink coffee with a tea spoon. (The coffee spoons are back in the kitchen, see, and are therefore beyond their reach.)
Though they can’t get to the kitchen, luckily they can make it to the bathroom (although one couple uses the bathroom for a tryst, and as a consequence feels they must commit suicide). During the course of the story, the company breaks through the dining room walls to find the water pipes so they can drink. And for food, they slaughter one of the sheep from a flock that fortuitously wanders through the room (did I mention that I didn’t really understand this opera?).
Exterminating Angel is noteworthy for including the highest note ever sung in the history of opera: high A about high C. I couldn’t find a working link to this achievement, but here is a link to a number of sopranos singing the second highest note in opera, A-flat above high C. This pleasant little ditty is from Jacques Offenbach’s tuneful Tales of Hoffman. The singer is supposed to be a mechanical doll with whom the hero has fallen in love (don’t get me started on the whole history of sex-bots in opera!).
We have a personal emotional link that ties spoons with being trapped, in a way. Back when Kathleen was first diagnosed with lupus, much less was known about it than is now, both by the medical community and the general public. The Lupus Society of America called it the most unknown common disease, and we’ve spent a good amount of time since then trying to learn more about what it is, how to cope with it, and how to talk to others about it.
One touching article that we found very useful in understanding the disease was a blog post by a fellow lupus sufferer called “The Spoon Theory“. In it, Christine Miserandino asks the reader to imagine that each morning, you are handed a number of spoons. When you have lupus, every activity (and that’s every activity, including waking up, and getting out of bed) costs you a spoon. When you are out of spoons, your day is over, period. You can’t hoard spoons and use them the next day—in the morning you will get your allotment, whatever it is for the day, and the care you took yesterday with them won’t help you today.
There’s nothing magical about spoons being the item with which your daily activities are counted, of course. The point is that they are discrete, tangible objects, and there is never any flexibility to how many there are, no matter how badly you want there to be more. They represent the hard limit lupus imposes on how much you can do in a day, that you can’t tough, bluff, or finagle your way past. It was a hard lesson to learn, and we still find it hard to teach others.
And on top of its incapacitating characteristics, those with lupus are especially vulnerable to other diseases, like covid. So now, in addition to all the limitations lupus had already put on our lifestyle, we are trapped by the knowledge that if either of us were ever contract the coronavirus, Kathleen’s “underlying health issues” make her a prime candidate for not surviving it. So we take every precaution, and take it double, to try to prevent ever catching it. It’s a pretty frightening place to be.
Not to end on too stark a note, here is one more spoon association. This is a picture of a banged-up, misshapen spoon being sold at a premium price (I could buy 8 grapefruit spoons for the cost of one of these!) because it epitomizes wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. I am a firm adherent of this aesthetic, especially when Kathleen, in the throes of cabin fever, suggests that it’s time to repaint the walls, or shine all the furniture, or re-sculpt all the topiaries. I can heartily recommend it!
May the eleventh be with you!,
Dorn
5/11/2020